Rodin and the Hand of God
By Isabel Hogben ‘29
The first time I saw The Hand of God, I almost genuflected.
On the third floor of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, The Hand stands alone. The Providence art school’s eleven galleries often tangle—portraits stack, mummies and biblical scenes call each other neighbor—but The Hand of God, a massive marble by the French “father of modern sculpture” Auguste Rodin, flouts any instinct to squeeze or stockpile.
From pockmarked rock, a massive Michelangelo hand emerges. The wrist of The Hand is taut with effort, but its fingers are gentle: the hand holds a boulder, from whose surface, two figures arise. The bodies of the first man and woman bend and braid into a sailor’s knot of a kiss, floating in fetal position. They—in the palm of Love itself—are being created.
Although the RISD Museum’s version was only a cast of the original, my knee reflexively bent. I shared the sentiment with the initial collector of its many replicas, B. Gerald Cantor, who confessed his first viewing inaugurated within him a “magnificent obsession.”
The statue seemed a parable: God creates the human person ex nihilo; the rough-hewn scrap marble from which the limbs emerge; into everything, a universe assailed by good and evil alike, but born and redeemed by the Passion. The curators seemed to recognize this; giving The Hand rare white space amidst an otherwise crowded collection. The Hand of God is great Christian art.
But the world almost lost Rodin’s talent—lost it to Christianity.
The earliest picture of Rodin is a smoldering 1862 daguerreotype. Rodin, twenty-two, glares into the camera, unshaven, though quite far from his famous beard. He hunches in a smock. But only months after the shoot, he would resolve to abandon his sculpting career entirely. Auguste Rodin would take another name: Brother Augustine.
After three rejections from the École des Beaux-Arts, Rodin despaired. When his beloved sister, Maria, died of peritonitis in a convent, it proved his breaking point. Within a month of her death, a guilt-ridden, deeply depressed Rodin joined the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, a fledgling Catholic order housed a mile away from his childhood home. Rodin had introduced Maria to a treacherous suitor, the heartbreak of which spurred her to join the community in which she caught her fatal sickness—his guilt consumed him, and a newfound “vocation” seemed a fitting way to honor Maria and her faith.
Brother Augustine moved into the Congregation’s first residence, Faubourg Saint-Jacques, to live and pray among the Brothers, preparing to take permanent vows and abandon his art. Fortunately, a superior had other plans.
Father Pierre-Julien Eymard, the founder of Rodin’s congregation, relegated Rodin to a garden shed—not as an anchorite, but as an artist. The brothers transformed the outbuilding into a workshop. The detritus of the cloister gardens was cleared out, work robes rehoused, spades, dibbers, and trowels moved, floor swept, grindstones and mouse traps dispersed, replaced by Rodin’s chisels.
Father Eymard encouraged Rodin to continue sculpting during his brief stay as a novice, even sitting for a bust. Eymard hated the resulting portrait—he thought Rodin had made his hair look like the “horns of the devil”—and hid it in the attic. Despite the incident, he recognized Rodin’s talent and encouraged him to leave the order to pursue life as a sculptor. Eymard is attributed with advising Rodin:
“Draw, model, trim, shape…and give the world your soul through Beauty… Some pray and save another person. Others paint, build, or sculpt and make others better. Some are roots, others trunks, and then there are all those who are branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits.”
Eymard, in his authority as Rodin’s spiritual father, had decided his vocation was not one of vows. Instead, he insisted that Rodin had a calling to redeem the world through his art, just as the brothers of the Congregation hoped to redeem it through their prayers. In accordance with the teaching of the Catholic Church, Eymard acknowledged that the consecrated life was a higher calling, requiring from the chosen few a total renunciation of the self, a living sacrifice the laity offer to God. But even though Eymard thought a vocation to the cloisters higher than one to chisels or to children, his commandment to Rodin was to the life of a Christian artist. But to many contemporary Christians, whether or not he fulfilled his calling is grounds for debate.
Admittedly, Rodin was hardly a saint. In the worst ways, he was a man of his times. Bohemia’s Paris chapter in the years before the First World War counted every vagrant intellectual, poet, dancer, writer, and rebel chorus girl as a member, and lasted for many decades undisrupted until Paris was christened la France combattante in early August of 1914. Chrism oil and incense mingled with absinthe and hashish along with the smell of the Seine. In Montmartre and Montparnasse, the decadence depicted in the late-19th-century sketches of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec some thirty years earlier seemed the stuff of les enfants—just a precursor to the libertine “liberty,” shocking equality, and dissolute fraternity that reigned in Paris in the years leading up to the Great War.
Rodin’s studio inside Hotel Biron (according to the French Senate’s hearings on the destruction of the hotel, an on-again-off-again residence for Rodin, Rilke, Matisse, and a dozen other names) was more of a brothel than a workshop, what with the dozen unclad iterations of the female form stalking the place at any given time in flesh and marble. Rodin asked his models to wander around in the nude, so that when a natural movement captured him—a raising of a girl’s “arms to gather her golden hair above her head,” “the nervous vigor of a man” mid-step—he could stop them where they stood, and promptly begin a sketch. In the same spat over the Hotel Biron, Rodin found himself up against the ire of French Catholics for reportedly displaying erotic drawings in the former chapel of the Sacre Coeur—an accusation later disproven, but not terribly far from the general spirit of his sketching in that period.
Art aside, the former Brother Augustine had turned into a lech. His mistress of fifty-three years, the separately very talented sculptor Camille Claudel, was only one example of the scores of models, avant-garde waifs, and girl dilettantes he collected over his career, a career led as often by the male libido as by the Muses. Isadora Duncan, icon of American dance, wrote in her diary about an encounter with Rodin, almost forty years her senior, as a young woman. On their first meeting, he apparently “came toward” her “with the same expression he had before his works,” trying to seduce her. Duncan fled, though she later lamented her loss of the “divine chance of giving [her] virginity to the Great God Pan [Rodin] himself.” Gwen John, a Welsh recluse, was yet another victim of his coquettery—she wrote him dozens of passionate letters after a one-time liaison. His Finnish student and sometimes lover, Hilda Flodin, described him as “addicted to women.” Models were lovers, and lovers, models. Rodin had become a philanderer extraordinaire: an adulterer supreme, a deflowerer of virgins, an eroticist exploiture.
The title of the Christian artist may seem alien to Rodin’s legacy. One might dream of a Brother Augustine who merited the label, puttering away with a chisel and some painter’s clay in the backgarden of the Congregation, doing busts of the sainted brothers and praying for the world he left behind.
But Rodin never discarded his baptized faith in full—to him, craftsmanship and Christianity were intertwined. From his childhood, the Rodin family supplemented their income selling handmade sacramentals—rosaries, medals, crucifixes. Devotional art was the first meaning of the word to young Auguste.
Other artists of his day made public proclamations of their nonbelief: Gustave Courbet famously demanded proof to paint an angel. Camille Pissarro embraced atheism along with anarchism. Emile Zola, despite his later religious evolution after writing Lourdes, declared himself an apostate, too. But even in his adulthood, Rodin despaired of no cosmology, disdained no deity, and unshackled himself from no spirituality. He was often wicked, but never secular.
His conception of himself as an artist was deeply Christian. In 1911, Rodin published L’Art, a series of reflections based on conversations with journalist Paul Gsell. It would be his only major work of writing besides The Cathedrals of France, a study of French Gothic church architecture written in the inaugural year of the Great War, an expression of devotion to his thoroughly Catholic La République en guerre. In L’Art, Rodin outlines his philosophy of art.
Rodin’s first postulate is that the pose “does violence to nature.” Instead of moving his models into set formulations, Rodin preferred to watch them move, vowing to “reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me.” He professes a reverence for reality fundamentally different from the mere imitation of the material—when Gsell presses him that “the cast [of the model] would give not at all the same impression as [his] work,” Rodin fires back: “Because the cast is less true than my sculpture!” He identifies his task of the artist not to “reproduce” “the exterior,” but to capture a spirit: “all the truth, and not only that of the outside.”
Gsell recounts:
“As he spoke he showed me on a pedestal near by one of his most beautiful statues, a young man kneeling, raising suppliant arms to heaven. All his being is drawn out with anguish. His body is thrown backwards. The breast heaves, the throat is tense with despair, and the hands are thrown out towards some mysterious being to which they long to cling… “Look!” He said to me… “I have exaggerated the straining of the tendons which indicate the outburst of prayer…”
To Rodin, the artist’s imperative is not to “look,” but to “see,” to discern a spiritual truth shining through a physical movement, and to depict this truth through the medium of the human body. For him, there is a Reality more real and a Truth more truthful than what we perceive. He rejects aesthetic relativism and affirms the relevance of artistic merit, writing that “all that is without soul and without truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all, in short, that lies, is ugliness in art.” To Rodin, “intending to improve upon nature,” is a grave sin, a damnable pride. “All is beautiful” to the artist because he "walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.”
One accusation against Rodin’s Christianity may be that his philosophy of art is more Pagan and Platonic than Christian, as it often lacks Christianity’s central character: Jesus Christ. After all, L’Art is full of Rodin’s praise of nature, exaltations of the human form, his lauding of Higher, Formal realities. While he is certainly not speaking of Gaia when he speaks of Nature, he writes of reality in a voice that often reads as patently Platonic. Might Rodin only be Christian in the way Tom Holland hypothesizes our culture is—as G.K. Chesterton’s graveyard, an asylum of “the old Christian virtues gone mad”?
Yet at the end of L’Art, in a section on his great and first love, Michelangelo, Rodin writes:
“The favorite themes of Michael Angelo, the depths of the human soul, the sanctity of effort and of suffering, have an austere grandeur. But I do not feel his contempt of life. Earthly activity, imperfect as it may be, is still beautiful and good. Let us love life for the very effort which it exacts. As for me, I ceaselessly endeavor to render my outlook on nature ever more calm, more just. We should strive to attain serenity. Enough of Christian anxiety, in the face of the great mystery, will always remain in us all.”
Rodin writes Enough! not as in the colloquial English, an expression of aggravation, but in concession. He rejects Michelangelo’s weariness towards the world, and wants to affirm “earthly activity” as such, as “still beautiful and good.” But he makes an acknowledgement: an old Christian apprehension will “always remain.” In the words of Flannery O’Connor, Rodin was as “Christ-haunted” as his France, hunted by the Holy Spirit, plagued by a lingering, lucid Christian conscience that never left him, his thought, or his art—the best evidence of Rodin as Christian artist.
Though few, his explicitly religious subjects are radiant. In Saint John the Baptist (preaching), drawn from an Italian peasant, Rodin expressed a desire to capture the figure as “a man of nature, a visionary, a believer, a precursor who came to announce one greater than himself.” The desert prophet is captured mid-stride and mid-explication, his physicality powerful, yet unassuming. The Baptizer’s expression sways more than his body—he is “prepar[ing] the way of the Lord,” (Matthew 3:3)—this and no more.
Many of Rodin’s most famous works, The Thinker and The Kiss among them, came from the bronze series The Gates of Hell, a monumental entrance commissioned by the French Directorate of Fine Arts, the theme at Rodin’s discretion. Rodin—an Italophile to his core, having fallen in love with the aforementioned Michelangelo and the other Roman and Florentine masters during an 1876 trip to the country—naturally chose Dante’s Divine Comedy. Rodin wrote that, “for a whole year, [he] lived with Dante, with him alone,” sculpting the terrors of the Inferno.
But The Cathedral of the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City is Rodin’s most visionary religious piece. It is part of the same series as The Hand of God. Two right hands hover, almost holding one another, the vertical chasm between the pair resembling the Gothic towers Rodin so admired—fingertips grazing upward into a steeple. To Rodin, humanity, down to our hands, is sacred—the space between two palms is as natural a location for worship as a basilica.
Rodin’s love of the unidealized human form runs throughout all his work. The disdain for the body exhibited in modernist pieces like Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is nowhere to be found. Though museums mistakenly associate Picasso and Rodin in joint exhibits, the anthropologies, philosophies, and spiritualities of the two could not be more divergent; Rodin’s remained Christian.
Rodin’s dedication to the human body can only be called devotion. His work, ever preoccupied with muscle and bone, breath and tension, speaks of the fundamentally incarnational faith of his childhood, caught up in persons and their parts. Rodin knew that the mark of the covenant was circumcision, that the creator of the Universe had a vested interest in Samson’s hair. The God of Rodin was one with hands of holes, who washed feet, whose side was speared, whose shoulders ached from carpentry and crucifixion. He knew that the story of a body—born of a Virgin, killed on Calvary, condescending in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in a cracker, speaking to a certain shepherd girl, appearing in Paray-le-Monial to reveal his Sacre Couer—is the central story of France, and of the whole world.
Gazing upon Rodin’s Hand, a subject he chose to chisel tirelessly throughout his career, one sees that Rodin’s work is fundamentally Christian; only a Christian can call ten human fingers a cathedral.
Contributed by Isabel Hogben. Isabel is a first-year at Harvard College.
